Kennedy accuses Emanuel of 'strategic gentrification plan' to force blacks out of Chicago

Chris Kennedy, Democratic candidate for governor, speaks about current politicians and the status quo. He is joined by his running mate Ra Joy and others. Jan. 3, 2018. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune)

Chris Kennedy, Democratic candidate for governor, speaks about current politicians and the status quo. He is joined by his running mate Ra Joy and others. Jan. 3, 2018. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune)

Democratic governor candidate Chris Kennedy on Wednesday accused Mayor Rahm Emanuel of leading a “strategic gentrification plan” aimed at forcing African-Americans and other minorities out of Chicago to make the city “whiter” and wealthier.

“I believe that black people are being pushed out of Chicago intentionally by a strategy that involves disinvestment in communities being implemented by the city administration, and I believe Rahm Emanuel is the head of the city administration and therefore needs to be held responsible for those outcomes,” Kennedy said during a news conference about gun violence in North Lawndale.

“This is involuntary. That we’re cutting off funding for schools, cutting off funding for police, allowing people to be forced to live in food deserts, closing hospitals, closing access to mental health facilities. What choice do people have but to move, to leave?” Kennedy added. “And I think that’s part of a strategic gentrification plan being implemented by the city of Chicago to push people of color out of the city. The city is becoming smaller, and as it becomes smaller, it’s become whiter.”

The mayor’s office responded by trying to link Kennedy to two Republican politicians who enjoy little popularity in Chicago — President Donald Trump and Gov. Bruce Rauner, whom Kennedy wants to replace.

“It’s sad to see Chris Kennedy joining President Trump and Gov. Rauner in using cynical, politically motivated attacks about Chicago’s communities for his own personal gain,” Emanuel spokesman Matt McGrath said in a statement. “His divisive comments today are a direct assault on one of this city’s greatest strengths — our diversity.”

McGrath also said Kennedy’s attack on Emanuel “ignored work being done in neighborhoods across the city” to “improve the quality of life for everyone who calls Chicago home.”

Kennedy, an heir to the iconic Massachusetts political family, has sought to appeal to African-American voters, focusing on the issue of gun violence and questioning the fairness of educational opportunities and property taxation in black neighborhoods. The names of his uncle, the late President John F. Kennedy, and father, the late U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, still carry resonance among older black voters from the family’s leadership in the struggle for civil rights during the 1960s.

Kennedy, who has had a tough time raising campaign money, is searching for a path to victory in the March 20 Democratic governor primary. He has ramped up his critiques of the Democratic establishment at a time when rival J.B. Pritzker has consolidated support from traditional Democratic organizations and spent tens of millions of dollars on TV advertising.

Kennedy has called for Berrios’ ouster after the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois published “The Tax Divide,” an investigation that found Berrios’ office’s assessments were so riddled with errors that they created deep inequities favoring owners of expensive commercial properties and homes at the expense of owners of smaller business properties and less-expensive homes.

Kennedy wants to ban elected officials from also holding outside jobs as property tax appeal lawyers. Madigan, for example, has a property tax appeals business.

On Wednesday, Kennedy added Emanuel to the list of top Democrats he’s criticizing, saying the mayor shouldn’t claim credit for a reduction in homicides last year compared with 2016.

“Not to the people of North Lawndale he can’t (claim credit). Not to the people in lots of neighborhoods in this city where crime continues to increase, not decrease; where funds have been removed; where schools are being closed; where community police officers don’t exist; where training of cops is diminished; where an entire generation of police officers are retiring early, leaving no one to mentor the younger officers; where crime is the result of that cataclysmic combination of forces,” Kennedy said.

The candidate contended Chicago was “using a strategy of selective containment where we’re allowing violence to continue as long as it only continues in certain neighborhoods.”

Those remarks drew a response from Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who portrayed Kennedy as out of touch with the city’s crime-fighting efforts. Johnson also said “no one is spiking the ball” on reducing violence.

“I’ve never heard from Chris Kennedy. I’ve never even met him. He’s never visited a police station or asked me or my team for any kind of briefing on what we are doing in Chicago to address the gang violence and ongoing infusion of illegal guns on our streets,” Johnson said in a statement. “I’m not a politician, but I do take issue with the hard work our men and women are doing to beat back this violence is used to score political points.”

Kennedy said adequate funding for the city’s public schools and for better law enforcement “isn’t available because the mayor allows the Cook County assessor to continue to underassess the downtown buildings owned by corporate America — people who make donations to Rahm Emanuel, folks he’s now protecting.”

The logic behind that attack, however, isn’t entirely accurate. Even if downtown buildings were assessed at a higher value, more money would not be available for schools and other government services because the overall tax burden would not be increased, but simply shifted more toward the commercial buildings and away from other taxpayers.

Kennedy said Emanuel’s predecessor, Richard M. Daley, filed “undervaluation complaints” about large commercial properties “until the assessor walked a straight line.” In 2003, the city Law Department said it had successfully fought $27 million in reductions that had been granted to assessments of business property.

“That’s not happening anymore. And as a result, we’re underfunding our schools and we’re underfunding our Police Department, and the result is violence,” Kennedy said.

Following the Tribune’s reports that raised questions about the assessment system, Emanuel was asked last month if he would start sending city attorneys to challenge assessment appeals filed on behalf of major commercial property owners, some of which are filed by law firms owned by Madigan and Ald. Ed Burke.

“I’m not going to speak to that at this point,” said Emanuel, dodging the question. “I appreciate that.”

Kennedy cited as an example of the “strategic gentrification plan” a move by CPS to close four South Side high schools for a year before a new school opens in 2019.

“I don’t know what you can say when the strategic plan for Chicago Public Schools suggest that the entire community of Englewood can go an entire year without access to a high school,” he said.

“What are you saying to the people there? No one’s going to move there who’s got a high school kid. And anybody with a high school kid has to think about what they’re going to do. It’s just a device to empty out the community,” he said.

Emanuel’s office did not directly respond to the schools criticism but cast Kennedy’s comments as little more than campaign season rhetoric.

“The noise of this particular election will come and go,” said McGrath, Emanuel’s spokesman. “And when it does, we’ll still be focusing on boosting neighborhood small businesses, investing in our schools and improving public safety.”

Federal census figures show that in 2010, a year before Emanuel was first elected mayor, Chicago’s African-American population totaled 895,294, or 33.2 percent. Census data released last year showed the number of black residents declining to 793,852, representing about 29.3 percent of the city’s population.

That continued a long-term decline in African-American population, as Chicago also lost 177,404 black residents between 2000 and 2010, census figures showed.

The accusations Kennedy lobbed Wednesday, while Emanuel remained out of town on vacation, took aim at a political weakness for the mayor: support among African-Americans.

Emanuel twice won the mayor’s office with significant backing from black voters, but much of that eroded in November 2015 after a judge ordered Emanuel to release dashcam video of the Laquan McDonald police shooting. White police Officer Jason Van Dyke shot the black teenager 16 times in the middle of a Southwest Side street.

The mayor’s court fight against releasing the video, a $5 million settlement with the McDonald family before a lawsuit was even filed and murder charges filed against Van Dyke the same day the video was released led to weeks of street protests, accusations of a cover-up and calls for Emanuel’s resignation.

Polls in the following months showed Emanuel’s support among African-Americans plummeting, and the city’s Police Department became the subject of a federal civil rights investigation by the Obama administration that found patterns of misconduct and excessive force against minorities.

Since then, Emanuel has sought to rebuild lost support by making a series of changes to the Police Department, revising the city’s policy on releasing police shooting videos and pursuing a plan to hire nearly 1,000 new officers.

As for Kennedy and Emanuel, there is not much of a public history between the two. Kennedy has supported Emanuel before, contributing $5,000 to the mayor’s campaign in September 2014, records show.